Author: Geoffrey Gibson

A morning in Nuclear Medicine

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

The cab driver from Southern Cross to Royal Melbourne Hospital was a laconic Turk.  He had a lot to be laconic about.  It was not so much the fall of Troy to the perfidious Greeks and their sulky champions – it had been a slow day, and he is probably one of those cabdrivers whose business capital is being shredded by the process that we antiseptically describe as ‘disruption’.  I tried to cheer him up.  He seemed to pick up on our discussion of house prices in Newport. That is not a subject that occasions happiness or relief in me.  I have a daughter who lives in Newport, and she correctly formed the view that I could not afford the luxury of living there – on a good day, I might get a small pad in Altona.  (Well, at least it’s named after a German town, and it is about half a century since I was doused in kerosene and had paint-scrapers applied to the bitumen sticking all over my body after cleaning a big vertical tank at the refinery there.  It had had a narrow manhole that my charge hand said that only I could slip through – that was one time you let me down, Len Foster.)

A volunteer at RMH showed me the way to the Department of Nuclear Medicine.  There I was to have some tests directed to determining the working capacity of my heart.  It felt like I was traipsing through the bowels of an aircraft carrier of some considerable age.  The highlight of the trip was formed by two huge photos of nurses at RMH, one taken in 1916, and the other in 1972.  There were of course obvious differences in uniform over the spread of nearly three generations, but far more remarkable were the differences in facial and bodily structures.  The photos are studies in themselves.  They reminded me that the male stock that we sent to the Western Front was very different to that which we sent to Vietnam.

There was a mild hiccup when I arrived at Nuclear Medicine.  I should have gone off one heart drug earlier before the tests than I did.  There was a suggestion, that I was not keen to embrace, that I may have to come back.  I could even feel a tantrum coming on.  The nuclear physician understood and shared my reaction.  He said he would talk to his boss.  He – I will call him Roger – seemed a very decent man, and I will come back to him.

After the nuclear injections are made, you have to wait before they take the first set of pictures (scans).  And you then go out in one of those silly open-fronted hospital gowns – the dream of any flasher – and sit there with two or three others involved in the process.  It is then that those on the conveyor belt to death or redemption exchange sympathies and anecdotes.  I was reminded of the day I turned up early at pathology at Kyneton and found that there were already three in the queue ahead of me.  The first said that he supposed it was time for the lady to do her vampire routine; the second said that we were all headed in the same direction; and the third said that we were all destined to go underneath the grass.  Bloody charming – the humour can be a little mordant.

One of the guys I talked with would have been in his mid-70’s.  He was English.  He had no teeth between his eyeteeth.  He also had a very curious view about climate change.  He thought that the winters were getting warmer and that the summers were getting cooler.  If you live near me, any such view is out of the question, at either end, and I wondered whether the condition that had brought him to Nuclear Medicine had affected his mind.

We were just getting on to discuss house prices at Newport when a charming young lady, whom I will call Julie, asked me to come in for the bicycle test.  I was very glad to get this invitation because the nuclear physician had expressed doubts as to whether I could successfully do this test since I had had one heart drug only 24 hours ago.  It now looked like we could do the whole session of pictures, stress test, followed by more pictures – with, I gather, different injections being made from time to time.  You start to feel like a bloody colander.

Julie is one of those professional people who ooze calm and confidence.  Her father was from Latvia, and she has what I would describe as an eastern European mien.  As it happens, Julie lives in Newport, and she was thinking of cycling around Malmsbury and Hanging Rock this weekend.  She, too, was the full bottle on house prices at Newport.

Julie was accompanied by a doctor during the actual time I was working on the exercise bike.  On this occasion, I did not get the statutory declarations, as I might call them, of the possibility of my dying on the job – and I did not miss them.  The doctor was extremely pleasant.  He was a man of colour, I think from the Subcontinent.  I sought to sound him out by referring to the recent cricket matches between Sri Lanka and Australia, but we did not get past discussing the cricket.  He was very absorbed in his work.

The setting up and completion of that test took almost an hour.  I then went back to the waiting area to wait for the next set of pictures.  I there had discussion with a man who I knew had come from Hungary.  (I knew that because I could overhear his examination while I was waiting for my injections to settle.)  He was a most charming and intriguing old man.  He had one of those gorgeous eastern European accents that you used to hear all round the MSO.  (Do you recall the time when Barry Humphries referred to the guy at the Bendigo or Ballarat town halls who said that ‘If it were not for the Jews and the poofters, we’d be up Shit Creek’?)

I asked him when he had left Hungary.  He said that was in 1945.  He left when the Russians came in in their tanks.  I omitted to ask how old he was then.  (I later overheard him say that he had been born in 1928.  He is therefore getting on.)  He was very interested to hear my description of the ballet of Anna Karenina that I saw in Budapest in about 1989.  He laughed out loud when I said that the first thing you see when the curtain goes up is a headlight of a steam train coming straight at you.  And his eyes fairly sparkled when I said that our gold medallist in the Pentathlon had gone to live in Hungary to improve her fencing and equestrian events.  He told me how good the Hungarians were at those sports.  I believed him.

He was a very interesting man, and I was sorry when they came to take him away – rather to my surprise, for a session on the bike.  He was very frail and shaking.  I later spoke to him after the session when he was resting on a hospital trolley.  He looked very distressed, and I had to suppress a wobble of the bottom lip.  I wished him all the best, and he said he was going to need it.  Via con dios, good and brave old man of Budapest!  (The salt of the earth?  At least our raw fabric.)

After he left, a small Chinese lady in full civilian dress padded in, and sat down.  I was about to open with her, when a head came out of a door, and said that her scans had remained constant, so that she could go.  She padded off, nodding contentedly in what I imagine is a Chinese way.

During this time, the head of nuclear medicine, Roger’s boss I suppose, would occasionally stop to have a word with me in passing.  He is a very matter-of-fact type of person, and his simple manner called to mind a manager at the Daylesford IGA telling me where I could find dog food.  That is I think a sensible way for a person in that position to behave.  There is no need to feed that old wives’ tale that they think they are God.  (Leave that to those my lot who wear ermine.)  His name is a good old-fashioned one – Associate Professor Meir Lichtenstein.  After the second lot of pictures, he came out and told me that they would do another one with a different camera and that I would be called in when they were ready.

While I was waiting, I heard Professor Lichtenstein examining another patient who sounded very young, but who apparently had been suffering from strokes.  I gathered that the question was then whether his condition affected his intellectual capacity because the professor was giving him tests in simple arithmetic.  It is very sobering to reflect that a person so young could be so sorely afflicted.  That is one thing about going to public hospitals – no matter how badly you think you might be travelling, the next poor bastard may be doing a whole lot bloody worse.  A little later, a male nurse of some age and a real burnished colour came in to comfort the young man – whose face I never saw – with that smiling white-eyed benevolence that people of such colour are so good at.  You miss this diversity in the sticks.

Now let me go back to the nuclear physician, Roger.  Quel nom!  Nuclear physician!  How do you improve on that, Mate?  He is a good-looking and plain speaking man on, I would think, the sunny side of 40.  He has a simple, direct manner and he is happy to engage in conversation, which is I think important in professional people dealing with others who may be in a state of anxiety if not fear.  We had a good laugh about the extent to which the sexiness of the French lady at La Couronne had contributed to my heart attack by selling me chocolate croissants and sausage rolls every Saturday and Sunday for years and years and bloody years – not to mention the baguettes which would later accept slabs of butter and fatty roast beef, served with full cream milk, before the siesta with the schnauzer (Ferdinand) and a Burmese cat (Miles Davis or Ella Fitz).  I gather these issues are not unknown to Roger.

I asked Roger if I could read my book while I was waiting for the injections to take effect.  Since the book was The Europeans, by Henry James, that led to a discussion about immigration.  Somehow I got on to his family.

Roger’s parents had come out here from Egypt in 1968, well before his birth.  They had done very well and they had been able to afford to send him to a private school (which in a very un-Melbourne like moment, I did not ask him to identify.  Bugger.)  His father was of French extraction, and he had trained in and got tickets in fine arts in both Paris and Florence.  No wonder he did well at the end of the earth where they were just coming out of six o’clock closing – even if his business was in graphic art down here.

Roger’s mother’s contribution was of a different order.  She is still with us, but in her time she was a woman of singular beauty in Egypt.  As such, she was given a small appearance in the epic film The Ten Commandments.  She even got to meet Charlton Heston – this was of course decades before that ghastly moment when Heston held up a gun and declaimed ‘from this cold dead hand’, so symbolising the madness of Americans about guns.  Roger treated me very well and I was very grateful.  I wished him all the best, but we agreed that poor Egypt looked like being past recall.

After the final set of pictures, the boss had a brief word to me saying that nothing untoward had been shown, but that they would report to the people at Peter Mac.

I was then free to go, which I did after going past again those big photos of the nurses, and a lot of that old kind of ducting that hangs from the ceiling that I used to crawl through to clean in the 1960’s.  (Crawling through ducts in hospitals or the RA CV was a piece of cake, but if you had to access ducts above a greasy kitchen, you had to act much like a human pull-through, and you had to ring your overalls out to squeeze out the fat when you were pulled out. There was every chance that you might come across one or two dead rats.)

So, I was released back into the world at large, after seeing a pretty good slice of life in a place where people go to fend off death – all this in the most blessed city on earth.

And I can’t help thinking that the medical profession may be travelling better than mine.  That’s one of those statements that is large enough to be plain silly – but it is gnawing at me, and from different angles.

Passing Bull 58 – Bullshit about being well informed

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

It is curious that the Looney Tunes of politics and what used to be called the chattering classes have over the last generation or so gone from one side of politics to the other.  Formally it was the Labor Party that was plagued with theorists and purists – now it is the Liberal Party.  If anything, the Liberal Party is suffering more from internal dissension now than used to be the case with the Labor Party.  If, like me, you can recall how toxic Labor Party politics were in the generation leading up to 1972, this is an appalling conclusion.  But I think it is correct, and it is one of the main reasons why this country is becoming ungovernable.  The decline does now look to be vicious – the more people distrust mainstream politicians, the more likely they are to vote for people who will really merit that distrust – and revulsion.  Just look at people like Farage, Trump, Corbyn, and Hanson.

Let us take Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt as examples of the chattering classes on the side of reaction in Australia.  (They like to call themselves ‘conservatives’, but that offends me – so do I.)  They see the world as split between those who can look at issues like Islamic terrorism and ‘freedom of speech’ clearly for what they are and those whose thinking is warped by what they call ‘political correctness’.  They live in a world of labels and slogans.  Their thinking is inhibited and their minds are closed.

There is another division that you can see.  It is between those who belong to or subscribe to the chattering classes and those who do not.  Would you agree that less than one in, say, twenty Australians happily take part in this kind of discussion?  A far smaller number knows ‘the Canberra bubble.’

There are currently four issues agitating people like Bolt and Jones – gay marriage; climate change; free speech and section 18 C; and the republic.  What thread can you trace between those four issues except reaction?  Would more than one person in twenty Australians want to spend more than five minutes talking about the lot?  If you sought to raise any of these issues – except perhaps the monarchy – in any pub I know, the best result you could expect would be a very funny look.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong in a person reacting, but it does look a little hard to avoid the impression that it is just a matter of time before these people are run over by the bus of history on each of those four issues.  (Was it Trotsky who spoke of people being thrown into the dustbin of history?)

And you can see how much trouble the reactionaries are causing the Liberal Party.  While he was Prime Minister, Tony Abbott was the very dux of reactionaries on each of the four issues I have mentioned.  (Indeed, it was his fawning adulation of the monarchy that finally convinced the nation that he was about as sane as Don Quixote.)

The new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has a very different view on each of the four subjects – his view is flatly opposed on each to that of Abbott.  His view is I think closer to the temper of the nation, but he has been placed behind bars put up by the forces of reaction. The result is a disaster for the country.  And it does seem a bit hard for the reactionaries, who are the core of most problems facing the Liberal Party, to blame Mr Turnbull for the lack of leadership that has bedevilled this country since the fall of Paul Keating.  In truth, the Liberal Party has been arrested if not hijacked by troglodytes.  It is grimly fascinating to watch Corbyn’s people do the same thing to the other side in England.

Mr Shorten is powerless to help.  He is the reverse of passionate intensity – he lacks all conviction.  He looks like a school prefect whose mum has dressed him and combed his hair, but who has lost his way to school.  I call him the Kelvinator Kid.  He can’t pass a refrigerator without opening the door to feel the light shine upon him.  And speaking of galahs who lust after the limelight, has Canberra seen anything more repellent than Sam Dastyari, the reincarnation of Edward G Robinson, the big screen’s standard hood?

There is another division that we can see.  It is between those who are well educated and those who are not.  You see it most plainly with Trump.  Most people I know would not allow Trump into their house – not because he is a stupid, lying, racist bully, but because he has no manners at all – he is just a spoilt child who never grew up.  Whenever he comes on to the screen, I have to suppress a feeling of nausea.  Then my eye goes to my copy of The Great Gatsby and I think of that immortal line:

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

We therefore wonder how anyone could vote for a man like Trump to become the President of the United States.  And for once, I’m happy to say that nothing like that could happen here.

Well, my view is that most of these people who are taken in by Trump are watchers of reality TV.  They are not too bright and are not very attractive – the sound and vision of the public addresses are very unsettling – there is a fever pitch of hate. It is very redolent of fascism. But we tend not to say things like that – first, because it would be impolite, and secondly, because it would be unhelpful: Trump and his followers feed on rejection.  But if you stand as the champion of those opposed to the elite, you may have to face the possibility that you are the champion of the gutter.  If the elite are the chosen, their opponents will come from those who have been rejected.  The trouble is that these rejects glory in their own martyrdom.

This division in education was well illustrated by Professor A C Grayling in discussing our gay marriage plebiscite.  (I incline to the view that this unholy imbroglio was devised by Satan to bring out the worst in our politicians and in our clergy.  If so, this is his biggest win since the apple.)  Grayling compared the history of this plebiscite with that of the British referendum on the E U – a prime minister making a bad promise to appease a faction of reaction in his own party.  He said that the result was terribly divisive ‘and tremendously unsettling to most informed opinion.’  That is certainly the view in places like Oxford, Cambridge, and London.  It is the view of most people I know here or in England.  They see the result as a very sad aberration.

The trouble is that the success of people like Farage, Corbyn, Trump, and Hanson shows that people of ‘informed opinion’ have utterly failed to come to terms with the views of people who are not so well informed on issues like migration and refugees. It is like the problem we have with our politicians – they get out of touch with what the proverbial people in the street or on the land think, and too many of them have never had a real job.

That last proposition does not go for people like Jones and Bolt – the less well-informed are precisely those to whom they appeal.  And the appeal consists of labels and slogans.  ‘Freedom’ is bonzer for any label – except for choosing the sex of the person you want to marry.  (This issue does put a bit of a dent in the aspiration of the reactionaries to call themselves ‘libertarians’.)

There was a beautiful example on a BBC panel show.  On the burkini issue, one very conservative commentator gave Milton and John Stuart Mill chapter and verse.  ‘I choose what I wear – not the government.’  Well, that is fine.  But any slogan has its limits.  Try giving that answer to the copper who arrests you on Piccadilly for wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Freedom or Death’ – and no further garments.  And if you can be arrested for wearing too little in public, it might seem a little odd if you could also be arrested for wearing too much.

The truth is that these theoretical arguments about ideas are not welcome to us down here.  Australians distrust ideology – the distrust is visceral.  That is why propaganda coming from think tanks is so dangerous for either major political party.  It is just, as I said, that at the moment it is the Liberal Party that is suffering the most from this form of political infection.

Not only do Australians not like ideology, they reject by and large the idea of being preached at by ‘intellectuals.’  The term ‘intellectual’ is almost as much a term of abuse as the term ‘academic’ or, God save us, ‘scholar’.

These aversions are not native to us in the Antipodes.  They come from more than 1000 years of history in the development of the English law and constitution.  The English have never asked whether a proposal to change or add to the law accorded with a theory.  They just asked whether it worked – and if it did, then later on someone might be bothered to invent a theory as window dressing.  Rousseau preceded the French Revolution; Locke came after the English Revolution.

This difference between the empirical approach of the British and the rationalist leanings on the other side of the Channel runs very deep through so many aspects of our public life.  It is why we and the Americans get into trouble when we try to impose some overarching absolute – like section 92 of our Constitution – on a quilt made out of centuries of hard, gritty experience.

So, on a slogan that is as plastic as that of ‘freedom of speech’, the English experience is to ask not whether a law accords with a theory or a political scheme, aspiration, or slogan, but whether it works.  We therefore put high theory or aspiration to one side and ask how long we would last without tearing ourselves apart like enraged Yahoos in a state of mayhem if we abolished all laws relating to offensive and insulting speech, and the police were then left powerless to deal with someone marching outside the front of a convent with a placard saying ‘All the women inside this building are sluts,’ or someone marching outside the Shrine on Anzac Day with a placard saying ‘All Anzacs are war criminals and cowards,’ or someone marching outside the Bendigo mosque with a placard saying ‘These Towel-Heads are not Religious – They are Mad’.

It is really a source of wonder that some people get so wrapped up in their own bullshit that they lose all contact with the rest of us.

Poet of the month: Henrik Ibsen

In the Picture Gallery

With palette laden

She sat, as I passed her,

A dainty maiden

Before an Old Master.

 

What mountain-top is

She bent upon? Ah,

She neatly copies

Murillo’s Madonna.

 

But rapt and brimming

The eyes’ full chalice says

The heart builds dreaming

Its fairy-palaces.

 

The eighteenth year rolled

By, ere returning,

I greeted the dear old

Scenes with yearning.

 

With palette laden

She sat, as I passed her,

A faded maiden

Before an Old Master.

 

But what is she doing?

The same thing still–lo,

Hotly pursuing

That very Murillo!

 

Her wrist never falters;

It keeps her, that poor wrist,

With panels for altars

And daubs for the tourist.

 

And so she has painted

Through years unbrightened,

Till hopes have fainted

And hair has whitened.

 

But rapt and brimming

The eyes’ full chalice says

The heart builds dreaming

Its fairy-palaces.

Pure Evil

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

We have to accept that people can do things that look to us to be pure evil.  Take the Terror in France in 1793, the Terror in Germany from 1933 to 1945, or the Terror now being inflicted by IS in the Middle East and elsewhere.  It is the kind of pure evil drawn by Shakespeare in Othello in Iago and by Herman Melville in John Claggart in Billy Budd.

Most of us cannot comprehend how previously decent people could bring themselves to do such evil, but we know that it is wrong to dismiss the examples as problems that were inherently French, German, or Islamic.  That would be to slip into the kind of labelling that underlies those evil ideologies and take us back to where we started.

Pure evil is all about in the book News of a kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It is a factual account of a series of abductions of prominent figures in Colombia in an attempt by a drug lord, Pablo Escobar, to do a deal with the government to prevent their being extradited to the U S – which was handing out sentences of life plus more.  Eighteen prominent people were abducted and held in appalling deprivation while negotiations went on.  We know from the blurb and the author’s introduction that two hostages will die – both women.  That disclosure leads to some urgency in the read.

The criminals who so cruelly hold these hostages have been leached of all humanity.  They appear to attach no value at all to human life.  It is as if the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount had never been uttered.  They are at least as mindlessly cold as Himmler and Heydrich.  They commonly stand over the hostages with a cocked machine gun saying that at the first hint of rescue the hostages will be shot.  It is apparent that the guards do not put much value on their own life – they know it is short.

Hannah Arendt wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations caused lot of concern, but they derive from a firm intellectual integrity.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’  Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.

Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin and Hitler.

We might here note the matter-of- fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

Fouché despatched groups of prisoners at Lyons with cannonades of grapeshot fired at close range against people who had been asked to dig their own graves.  The merely wounded were finished off with sabres.  The killers could loot the bodies.  When the tide turned, Fouché lay low for a while, but then he was a key player in bringing down Robespierre, and Napoleon would make him chief of police.  Fouché was a serial survivor, a former seminarian who had no conscience at all.

We see a lot of banality in News of Kidnapping.  One hostage is taken with horrifying violence and many attempts to cover the tracks of the criminals – he then becomes aware that his captors are in a hurry because they want to go downstairs to watch the big local footy derby on TV.  This they do leaving him with a bottle of grog to listen to the game on the radio (which he then does).

While holding cocked weapons on their hostages, the guards have parties on saints’ days and birthdays and they are full of devotion for the Marian cult and ritual and superstition that pervades Latin America.  But when it comes time for a hostage to be executed, a sixty year old former beauty queen, someone fires six shots into her head at close range.  There are twelve entry and exit wounds.  Someone steals her shoes before the police arrive.  What kind of human being borne of a woman could do that to another human being?  How deranged and conscienceless can our human psyche get?  Was the killer jealous of her looks and finery?

Elsewhere, I said the following about Claggart (and Captain Vere and Billy Budd):

Since Claggart is the strongest character in the triangle, he has attracted the strongest writing in the book, the opera and the film.  He is in the tradition of Iago:

… if Cassio do remain,

He hath a daily beauty in his life

That makes me ugly.

That could be word for word Claggart on Billy.  Shakespeare defined a similar envy in one of the assassins of Caesar.

… Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

…

He is a great observer and he looks

Quite through the deeds of men.

…

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort

As if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit.

That could be moved to smile at anything.

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease

While they behold a greater than themselves,

And therefore are they very dangerous.

Again, Claggart, chapter and verse.  If you hand those lines around in a large office and ask people whom they are reminded of, they will invariably indicate the resident smiling assassin.

In a narrative manner, but with a matter-of-fact investigative tone, Melville devotes lines of a very high order to Claggart.  The following words might have been applied to Heinrich Himmler:

… The Master-at-Arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.  And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that cynic disdain – disdain of innocence.  To be nothing more than innocent! … A nature like Claggart’s surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible act out to the end the part allotted to it. 

And then there is this:

The Pharisee is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid chambers underlying the Claggarts.

We are left with the mystery of Hannah Arendt or what Carlyle referred to near the end of The French Revolution as ‘the madness that lies in the hearts of men.’  There may not be all that much between us and the primeval slime.

Passing Bull 57 Bullshit about sport and money

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

Australians do not like sports administrators.  That is putting it softly.  They were revolted by what the Panama Hat Brigade did to our Dawn and at Kevan Gosper’s spoiling Kathie’s night by presenting her medal.  Now we have to put up with John Coates.  Is there anyone in this wide land who likes or respects this man?  He is a lawyer from Sydney with tenure with the IOC and AOC longer than that of most African dictators and he pulls down north of $700,000 a year so that he can schlep about the planet in the right part of the aircraft and then point the bone at everyone but himself for any perceived failure.  If the Australians have ‘failed’, whatever that means, at the Olympics, who could be more responsible than John Coates?

For reasons given by David Crawford and others in The Australian today, I think that our athletes did incredibly well at Rio.  The problem was that people had created unrealistic expectations that put an unfair burden on our chosen few.  Another problem was that the games should never have been held there.  Another problem was that the Russians should never have been let in, and the athletes were left to repudiate their minders.  This combination of ineptitude and corruption blights and typifies the IOC and taints anyone inside their shadow.

Yet this Sydney lawyer waffles on – before the games have ended – about Australians not getting an adequate return on their capital investment.  Not in my bloody name, Sport.  I don’t pay taxes to swell the egos of professional entertainers or to gratify couch-dwellers with an unabashed nationalism that would make Kipling look like a shy novice.  I don’t sponsor spoiled brats with no brains and less manners to pose as tennis players or any other over-paid service-provider.

Does any sane person think more of the Poms or the Japs now that they are in the business of buying Gold and puffing their chests through the medium of the IOC?  Do the English not see that they have destroyed their national identity in football through that moral and intellectual trainwreck called the English Premier League?  Is that not sufficient warning of the dangerous futility of spending treasure on circuses and colosseums for the masses?  Why don’t we apply our capital for sports facilities for kids at the bottom rather than adults at the top?  Do these people not see an almost universal revolt against what people call inequality and elitism and entrenched hierarchies – all qualities made flesh in John Coates?

After the women’s sevens, the unsurpassable highlight at Rio for me was Chloe Esposito.  (The women may yet save rugby in Australia – God knows that the Wallabies need all the help that they can get.)  Chloe’s was a colossal achievement in areas where European nations are so much stronger.  It was an achievement to match that of Michelle Payne – and Chloe, God bless her, has the same sunny, Australian plainness of outlook and speech.  We can all be mightily proud of Chloe and her family – and it would be so much worse than vulgar even to mention money in the same breath.  I may just add that her brother finished seventh – the place filled by Chloe in London.  This could be the start of a dynasty!

Mr Coates was also quoted as saying that the issue of crime was not addressed in Rio’s submission to stage the games.  I went there in about 1989.  Most parts were no-go and we were advised not to wear watches.  A few years later urchins spewed out of the sewers and overran the beaches.  Criminality in Rio is notorious around the world.

It is time for Mr Coates to move on.   One of those ghastly gaming companies that blight sport on TV would give you long odds against his doing that sans dynamite.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

Adventure Bay

Sophie’s my world… my arm must sooner or later

Like Francis Drake turn circumnavigator,

Stem the dark tides, take by the throat strange gales

And toss their spume to stars unknown, as kings

Rain diamonds to the mob… then arch my sails

By waterspouts of lace and bubbling rings

Gulfed in deep satin, conquer those warmer waves

Where none but mermaids ride, and the still caves

Untrod by sailors…aye, and with needle set,

Rounding Cape Turnagain, and take up my way,

And so to the Ivory Coast…and further yet,

Port of all drownéd lovers, Adventure Bay!

Jim

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

 

But why now, Jim?  I know I have been less than regular at the Big Table recently, but did it have to come to this?  Well, I suppose that having a logical mind, you will say ‘why any other time?’  And the truth is – the one great truth is – that it must happen some time.

We could have further recalled that day – that wonderful day for me about a quarter of a century ago – when I was hearing tax cases at a tribunal that then sat in an insalubrious part of King Street.  I used to hear cases on Friday so I could write a decision on the weekend.  I had given the papers a cursory look – Lord Denning, whom you disapproved of, was very firmly of the view that people hearing cases should not go into the material in depth before the start of the hearing, but leave it up to counsel to say what the case was about.  I saw that it was a stamp duty case and that it raised a very simple issue.  Should duty on a transfer of land be assessed on the value of the legal estate or on the value of the equitable estate?  The taxpayer was AMP (I think) and was represented by Mallesons – this is what’s called the big end of town.  The amount of money involved was very large.  This could obviously be a big case.

Well, in the name of God, there must be truckloads of law on this.  But I was to find out that this was one of those unnerving lacunae in our law.  I asked my clerk to find out who was appearing.  She told me that Mr J D Merralls QC was appearing with Mr David Batt for the taxpayer and that Mr Richard Boaden was appearing for the Crown.  I think I may say that my heart felt like it skipped a beat with something like a mixture of apprehension and pride.  I was to be addressed on a very fine point of equity by the undisputed leader of the equity bar.

As I recall, we ran until about 1:35 PM.  I like to finish before lunch.  If you allow some counsel time to get second wind, you might be there forever.  I recall having to ask Richard Boaden whether he thought he might make some passing reference to the decision of the Crown that he had been briefed to defend – the case had opened up a worryingly wide issue.  People who have to decide cases like to know what is the question that they have to answer.

I took off to the other end of town to begin writing a decision.  I had no idea what the result might be – I was in truth having some difficulty working out what the process to reach any result might be.  I formed the view that this task would relieve me of going to the partners’ conference in Canberra.  I was overruled on that.  I flew up to Canberra, put a folder with my name on it outside the front door of the main meeting room and returned to my room in the Hyatt to spend the whole weekend on room service writing the decision.  I suppose it took about twenty hours.  (The pay, as you know, Jim, was ludicrous.)

I think I put the decision out on Monday.  You lost.  And you took it like the sportsman that you are.  I was lucky never to be worried about what might happen to anything I did on appeal, but in this case I did not want to let you down.  In truth, I did not want to make a fool of myself before you.  We had to drill down, as they say on Bloomberg TV, beyond Snell, beyond Ashburner, and even beyond Maitland, my hero – and perhaps go in search of what your hero, Sir Owen Dixon, was pleased to call ‘basal principle’.  I might say that I found the whole thing both draining and exhilarating.  That is I think the great prize in any professional life – but these prizes come with a price tag.

Or we could have further recalled that time in, I think, 1971, when I was sitting as the Associate to the late Tom Smith.  You fought a little will case against Stephen Charles and, I think, some other member of counsel.  The argument passed clean over my head.  I was able to produce my Associate’s notebook of the case – and of course you were able to produce your numbered volume of your court book showing the outline of the argument of the case – which you could recall.  I forgot who won, but I can remember not being able to handle the pronunciation of some of the nominate reports.

Or we could have further recalled that time when your horse won that big race and you were introduced to the Queen and the Duke, and His Royal Highness, as is his wont, made some droll remarks of a faintly anti-establishment kind.  Or we could have further discussed those hilarious meetings between you and Gough, which Gough was able to recall in all their details – I wondered whether you got the irony of the fact that you also were able to recall every part of those meetings so many years after the event.

Or we could have recall the time when our email correspondence got underway.  I recall your asking me whether I really had a daughter who was married to the Captain of the Melbourne Storm – I used to refer to Cameron Smith as my son-in-law.  That correspondence from time to time threatened to become voluminous and to affect our outputs, as they say.

It started when I got into some strife.  I was grateful for your support.  It was of course not unqualified.  When I first saw your name appear on my computer screen, I felt a certain frisson.  I would never lose it, Jim.  Your notes were always to the point, and might sometimes fairly be said to have been terse.  Your emphatic decency could sometimes be unsettling.  You and I differed on a lot of things – such as Lord Denning, Melbourne Storm, and Panto outfits – but deep down there was not I think a lot between us.  But if I ever did take any wounds from you, Jim, they were only glancing, and, more importantly, I took them down the front – and God knows that is very rare for us – or anywhere else.

In what I think may have been your last email to me, you gave as usual sensible advice.  You said that if I were to be diagnosed with cancer, I could not do so in a better place than Melbourne.  After two visits to Peter Mac, I understand just what you mean.  And I think I have embarked on what might prove to be a series of waltzes or foxtrots that will go on until it comes my turn to shuffle off.  As a German lady friend who has been through the mill said to me in an email that arrived overnight: ‘There is nothing to be done but to keep the dates of the regular examinations and to enjoy the time in between’.

 

My relationship with that quaint construct called the Victorian Bar has been on and off, love and hate.  You were not so equivocal, but neither were you blinded.  You stood for all that is good in this part of the profession.  You are one of the few people I know from whom the word ‘honourable’ does not sound ridiculous.  (The late Sir John Young was another.)  You remind me of the boot-studder at the Collingwood Football Club – you are one of the solid, devoted, and utterly irreplaceable pillars of the place.  Without people like you, Jim, our lives are so much poorer.

Now that you have gone, Jim, I have lost part of the furniture of my mind – part of my juristic as well as my forensic furniture.  You have been a large part of my education and inspiration.  But I can and will take my comfort from what I know that you also thought to be some of the most telling lines ever written.  When Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke at his Grandma Julie’s burial, he used words of surpassing beauty that keep coming back to us.  ‘She came out of a different time, out of a different spiritual world, and this world will not shrink into the grave with her.  This heritage, for which we are grateful to her, puts us under obligation.’  Bonhoeffer, too, understood and lived as a member of the noblesse oblige.

And for you, Jim, and only for you, I will award a Latin tag.  You were sui generis – by the length of the bloody strait at Flemington.

But, bugger it Jim, there is now one less Old Melbourne Grammarian for me to annoy.  And there will be one less person in the world to ask me if I really wore a pink cap to school.

ANNA KARENINA

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Having just read Anna Karenina for the third time, I will set out what I said about it a few years ago after reading it for the second time, and then add a few observations.  The book is a great work of art, and it may cast its spell in different ways on different viewings.

***

So, how did the most famous affaire of western literature start?

Her bright grey eyes which seemed dark because of their black lashes rested for a moment on his face as if recognizing him, and then turned to the passing crowd evidently in search of someone.  In that short look, Vronsky had time to notice the subdued animation that enlivened her face and seemed to flutter between her bright eyes and a scarcely perceptible smile which curved her rosy lips.  It was as if an excess of vitality so filled her whole being that it betrayed itself against her will, now in her smile, now in the light of her eyes.  She deliberately tried to extinguish that light in her eyes, but it shone in spite of her in her faint smile.

You cannot put that on the screen.  It is the pure magic of genius.  How might lover-boy, Count Vronsky, react?

Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility.  Not only did he dislike family life, but in accordance with the views generally held in the bachelor world in which he lived [ as an aristocratic officer in the army], he regarded the family, and especially a husband, as something alien, hostile, and above all ridiculous.

Lover-boy gets worse.  He knows his attentions to her at the opera will be obvious and commented upon.

He knew very well that he ran no risk of appearing ridiculous….in the eyes of Society people generally.  He knew very well that in their eyes, the role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous……

How does the beautiful Anna Karenina fall for such a cheap and hollow devotee of human blood sports?  She had married an older man, a dry, didactic civil servant who spoke to her superciliously, a devoted civil servant and father, a man of God, who had no soul at all.  He was not really a man.  Anna muses to herself.

They do not know how for eight years he has been smothering my life, smothering everything that was alive in me, that he never once thought I was a live woman in need of love.  They do not know how at every step he hurt me and remained self-satisfied.  Have I not tried, tried with all my might, to find a purpose in my life?   Have I not tried to love him, tried to love my son when I could no longer love my husband?  But the time came when I understood that I could no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, and cannot be blamed because God made me so, that I want to love and live.

This is a primal cry for release.  We already know that Vronsky may not be the man to carry the load, but now we know that Karenina will be a cold implacable enemy who will not even seek a duel, but will seek to rein in and humiliate an errant wife with all the power at his male disposal – including his power over his son.  How would Vronsky’s code rule his conduct toward Karenina?

The code categorically determined that though the card-sharper must be paid, the tailor need not be; that one might not lie to a man, but might to a woman; that one must not deceive anyone except a husband; that one must not forgive an insult but may insult others, and so on.  These rules might be irrational and bad but they were absolute, and in complying with them, Vronsky felt at ease and could carry his head high.  Only quite lately, in reference to his relations to Anna, had he begun to feel that his code did not quite meet all circumstances, and that the future presented doubts and difficulties for which he had no guiding principle.

One such doubt or difficulty might be Anna’s becoming pregnant.  What did the code of the military nobles say about pregnancy?

The novel starts with the well-known line: ‘All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’  Prince Oblonsky thinks that his wife is passed it – at thirty-four after a few kids – and he has been caught playing around.  Ironically, it is Anna, his sister, who persuades his wife, Dolly, to forgive him his lapse.  Does Oblonsky learn his lesson?  Not a bit of it.  Nothing like a tumble in the hay with the staff to get out the cobwebs.  We get this 600 pages later:

‘Why not, it’s amusing?  Ca ne tire pas a consequence.  My wife won’t be the worse for it, and I shall have a spree.  The important part is to guard the sanctity of the home!  Nothing of that kind at home; but you needn’t tie your hands.’

It reminds you of the defence of prostitution by Saints Augustine and Aquinas as the shield of marriage.  A bit on the side may be good for you.  It is almost like the defence of necessity.

The Russian nobility was useless and doomed.  God and his Orthodox Church were corrupt and dying.  The bourgeoisie were no better – and they were about to show that they could not pick up the political baton.  Men were exploring the difference between immorality and amorality.  Women were just left to rot.  The whole rotten edifice would expire under the seething ego of Lenin and the lust for power of that sadist, Stalin.

It was the tragedy of Anna Karenina that having married a cold man, she then fell in love with an empty man.  Vronsky was not fit to tie her laces either as a character or as a person.  But they have to be condemned by Society.  They knew that.  They are like Adam and Eve cast out of Eden.  The sex is hot and guilty and they have no future.  After they go to bed together for the first time, we get this:

Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.

She held his hand and did not move.  Yes!  These kisses were what had been bought by their shame! ‘Yes, and this hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.’  She lifted his hand and kissed it.  He knelt down and tried to see her face, but she hid it and did not speak.  At last, as though mastering herself, she sat up and pushed him away.  Her face was as beautiful as ever, but all the more piteous.

‘It’s all over,’ she said.  ‘I have nothing but you left.  Remember that.’

‘I cannot help remembering what is life itself to me!  For one moment of that bliss….’

‘What bliss?’ she said with disgust and horror, and the horror was involuntarily communicated to him.  ‘For heaven’s sake, not another word!’

This is high-voltage writing, indeed.  Vronsky is not up to looking after Anna as the gates of a duplicitous society are shut in their faces.  This is how Dolly laments the raw injustice of it all.

‘And they are all so down on Anna!  What for?  Am I better than she?  I at least have a husband whom I love.  Not as I wished to love, but I still do love him; but Anna did not love hers.  In what was she to blame?  She wishes to live.  God has implanted that need in ourselves.  It is quite possible I might have done the same.  I don’t even know whether I did well to listen to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow.  I ought then to have left my husband and begun life anew.  I might have loved and been loved, the real way.  And is it better now?  I don’t respect him.  I need him,’ she thought of her husband,’ and I put up with him.  Is that any better?  I was still attractive then, still had my good looks,’ she went on, feeling that she wanted to see herself in a glass.

Another primal lament.

The disintegration of the union – the end of the affair: anything except that weasel word, ‘relationship’ – is etched in acid.  As happens when lovers fall out, the degradation is mutual.

‘I don’t want to know!’ she almost screamed.  ‘I don’t!  Do I repent of what I have done?  No!  No!  No!  If I had to begin again from the beginning I should do just the same.  For us, for you and for me, only one thing is important: whether we love each other.  No other considerations exist.  Why do we live here, separated and not seeing one another?  Why can’t I go?  I love you, and it’s all the same to me,’ she said, changing from French to Russian, while her eyes as she looked at him glittered with a light he could not understand, ‘so long as you have not changed toward me!  Why don’t you look at me?’

He looked at her.  He saw all the beauty of her face and of her dress, which suited her as her dresses always did.  But now it was just this beauty and elegance that irritated him.’

What was that argument about?  Whether they should be seen together at the theatre.  She goes – and she gets cut – brutally.  She is the fallen woman – Eve – incarnate.

The other story is about Levin and Kitty who strongly resemble Pierre and Natasha in War and Peace.  It is comparatively prosaic and for our tastes now, too preoccupied with the emancipation of the peasants, Russian agriculture and the death of God.  And their story is up and down.  It may remind you of T S Eliot on Hamlet ‘Emotion is in excess of the facts as they appear.’  You can edit a lot of the politics out – as in War and Peace.

There are pieces of bravura writing, as in the ball scene, the steeple chase, and the duck shooting.  We get realism from minute detail.  Here are snippets from the wedding of Levin and Kitty – you have heard it all before.

‘Why is Marie in lilac?  It’s almost as unsuitable at a wedding as black.’

‘With her complexion, it’s her only salvation,’ replied Princess D.  ‘I wonder why they are having the wedding in the evening, like tradespeople.’

‘It is more showy.  I was married in the evening too’, answered Mrs K and sighed as she remembered how sweet she had looked that day, how funnily enamoured her husband then was, and how different things were now.

A count is chatting to a princess ‘who had designs on him.’

She answered only with a smile.  She was looking at Kitty and thinking of the time when she would be standing there beside the count, just as Kitty now stood, and how she would then remind him of his joke…….

All the details of the ceremony were followed not only by the two sisters, the friends and relatives, but also by women onlookers who were quite strangers, and who – breathless with excitement and afraid of missing anything, even a single movement, and annoyed by the indifference of the men – did not answer and often did not hear the latter when they jested or made irrelevant remarks…..

‘Now hear how the deacon will roar” Wives obey your husbands.”’

It was ever thus.  The girls swoon and the boys turn green.  Have you never seen a secretary parade the ring, then the album, and then the baby – and the rest go gaga?  Someday all will this be mine!  It is just the look that ensainted barristers get on their face at a judicial welcome.

The quarrels get worse.  Anna is on drugs.  The end comes like a kaleidoscope.  The final descent into what now seems the only possible outcome for this star-crossed lover is written – it is composed – with murderous power.  They first met on a railway station and it will end at one.  Anna sets out on her last journey.  She looks outside her horse-drawn carriage.

‘They want that dirty ice cream, that they do know for certain’, she thought, looking at two boys stopping at an ice cream seller…  ’We all want what is sweet and tasty.  If not sweetmeats, then dirty ice cream.  And Kitty’s the same – if not Vronsky, then Levin.  And she envies me, and hates me.  And we all hate each other.’

She gets to the station.  She is somehow drawn to a platform.  A goods train approaches.  This is how it all ends.

But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees.  And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing.  ‘Where am I?  What am I doing?  Why?’  She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on the head and dragged her down.  ‘God forgive me everything’, she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling….A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails.  The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil, flared up with a brighter light, lit up for her all that had been before dark, crackled, began to flicker, and went out forever.

I think that Tolstoy loved Anna.  I first read this book forty years ago when I was plainly too young.  This time, I was half in love with Anna myself, but she was never going toward an easeful death.  For me now, Anna Karenina is the largest female hero in all our literature (specifically including Shakespeare for this purpose).

Madame Bovary is very different.  The book is an exquisite indictment of the French bourgeoisie –as damning as Tolstoy’s indictment of the Russian nobility.  The book has no sympathetic characters, but for me at least, Emma has none of the heroic grandeur of Anna – even down to her tawdry, protracted, and melodramatic suicide.  Emma is just a bored housewife with a spending problem and an inept way of putting it about.

(Turgenev introduced Flaubert to Tolstoy.  ‘Sometimes he seems Shakespearean.  I cried aloud with admiration as I read….In any case, he has balls!’  Flaubert complained that Tolstoy repeats himself and philosophises.  Turgenev replied that Flaubert had put his finger on the spot – Tolstoy ‘has also conceived a philosophical system at once mystical, childish, and arrogant: this has doubly spoiled his second novel (Anna).’)

Anna Karenina is a stunning, colossal achievement of the human spirit.  As with Joyce, you are left wondering how a man could get into the head of a woman (unless you are one of those poor, blind, drab souls who think that men and women are the same.)  If you ask me whether Anna was a hero in Shakespeare’s mode – one whose end follows from some flaw in her character – my response is that you are begging the question posed by the whole bloody book.

That question is simple enough.  Could Anna have a life?

***

The analogy with the fall of Adam and Eve still holds good for me – the woman takes the hit, and the consequences of the original sin are inexorable.  But rather than look to Madame Bovary, which was written about twenty years before Anna Karenina, we might look rather at Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which came out at about the same time and caused a sensation across Europe.  Nora has a hollow marriage like Anna – to a shallow man who looks upon her as a kind of doll.   In the end, Nora does the unthinkable – she repudiates the marriage, and walks out – slamming the door.  (Hedda Gabler’s repudiation is more extreme.)  Tolstoy tells us this of Vronsky:

For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; but the idea that she might and should have her own independent life appeared to him so dreadful that he hastened to drive it away.

That is Nora’s husband, word for word.  Anna says of Karenin, ‘He does know what love is.’  Neither does Vronsky.  During one of their first tiffs, we are told that Vronsky ‘felt something rising in his throat, and for the first time in his life he felt ready to cry.’  Anna says of her husband ‘He is not a man but a machine, and a cruel machine when angry…..I am like a hungry man to whom food has been given.’  When Anna confesses to her husband, his only thought is of Society.  ‘The one thing that preoccupied him was the question of how he could best divest himself of the mud with which she in her fall had bespattered him….’  You can’t get meaner than that.  We saw a similar reaction from Nora’s husband.  When the affair disintegrates, Anna asks of Vronsky ‘What did he look for in me?  Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity.’  There is a lot of Vronsky in Donald Trump, the quintessence of self-centred shallowness.

Both of these works are fierce protests at the miserable standing of women and at the hypocrisy and emptiness of the responsible ‘Society’.  The author pulls no punches on the misery of women in child bearing and rearing.  Dolly Oblonsky is well and truly unattractive at 34, and Anna has to take steps to stop going the same way.

‘Altogether,’ she [Dolly] thought, looking back at the whole of her life during those fifteen years of wedlock, ‘pregnancy, sickness, dullness of mind, indifference to everything, and above all disfigurement.  Even Kitty – young pretty Kitty, – how much plainer she has become!  And I when I am pregnant become hideous, I know.  Travail, suffering, monstrous suffering, and that final moment – then nursing, sleepless nights, and that awful pain!’

The social debates at the other end – with Levin – can get wearing but you might strike gold.  There is a discussion about why Russia is in a Serbian war.  Someone says this was a case where ‘the whole people directly expresses its will.’

‘That word people is so indefinite,’ said Levin.  ‘Clerks in district offices, schoolmasters and one out of a thousand peasants may know what it is all about.  The rest of the eighty millions….not only don’t express their will, but have not the faintest idea what there is to express it about.  What right have we then to say it is the will of the people?’

So much for Rousseau and the ‘theory’ of the French Revolution.  Tolstoy says the problem here is ‘pride of intellect.’  He was dead right, and this is still a very great book.  It is as elemental and doom-laden as Greek tragedy.

It is not possible to do justice to this book on film; I have seen two good ballet productions; but in my view it is best taken as opera – straight off the page.

Passing bull 56 – Bullshit about manners, taste and identity: Part II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

 

In his piece about identity politics, Mr Kelly wrote about the reaction to the Four Corners program about the abuse of young aboriginals in detention in the Northern Territory.   Mr Kelly said that the media had been reluctant

….to mention, let alone canvas, the underlying causes – the breakdown of the indigenous social and family order through a range of issues including family dislocation, neglect, violence, parental abuse and drunkenness.

Mr Kelly referred to a commentator who referred to ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’.  Mr Kelly said that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

Why were the alleged failures of parents of black children relevant to a story about revealed cruelty and mistreatment by government of the products of those failures?  We are again talking at a very general level but how does the suggestion that children have been let down by their parents bear on the actual mistreatment shown in the program?  I don’t get the point.  Are we, God-like, apportioning some kind of universal blame?  I don’t know.

Perhaps the problem comes from the author’s reference to ‘the underlying causes’ – causes of what?  The mistreatment of aboriginals in detention, which was the subject of Four Corners, or the miserable condition of blackfellas at large?  If the latter, how do you avoid going back to 1788?

The cartoonist, Bill Leak, had a cartoon depicting three figures in the outback.  A Northern Territory copper holds a kid by the scruff of the neck before his father.  Both blackfellas are depicted as ugly – some would say Neanderthal – and in bare feet.  Dad holds a can of beer.   The copper says: ‘You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility.’  Dad replies: ‘Yeah, right, what’s his name then?’

 

What that cartoon means to you will probably vary on where you come from.  It will mean some things to some white people and some other things to some coloured people.  What it suggests to me is that blackfellas are drop-out drunks incapable of being responsible for their children.  On that meaning, the cartoon is plainly racist, since it denigrates a people by reference to their race.  I find it hard to see how you could avoid saying the cartoon is tasteless and, yes, offensive.  How would you like it if someone said that about you?

 

Mr Kelly has a very different and very clear view.  He says that Mr Leak has made clear the purpose of the cartoon.

… If you think things are pretty crook for children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from.  It wasn’t hard to get.  But the fascinating thing about Leak’s piece was the feedback he got that people couldn’t understand his cartoon.

That’s right, they didn’t get it – surely a victory for a politically correct, dumbed down education system and the spread of identity politics culture where such images turn the brain into a non—functioning, non—computing defence mechanism.

Well, if that was Mr Leak’s purpose, he failed to make it clear to me.  And what does it add to the Four Corners story to say that the victims of the government were worse victims of their own upbringing.  How is that allegation relevant?  Well, it might be relevant if you are trying to spread responsibility for the unhappy fate of these people.  ‘Responsibility’ is the dominant word in the cartoon; Mr Leak omits it from his description of his purpose; Mr Kelly says that the cartoon depicts an ‘irresponsible indigenous father who couldn’t recall the name of his son.’

The real problem with the cartoon is that it can have no relevance to the news story unless the shoddy beer-can-bearing black father is said to be typical of blackfellas – and on no view is any such proposition attractive.  And the problem for Mr Kelly is that his inability to see how other people might react differently to the cartoon reveals that he is used to speaking to the true believers who are happy to share the same bubble.

Mr Kelly then offers himself some gratuitous legal advice, saying of s.18C that ‘on racial issues, the test is subjective – whether the individual is offended.’  Mr Kelly wants a reference to ‘community values’.  If it is the law that a person can succeed under this statute simply by saying that ‘I personally am offended – at being described as of Scottish descent when I’m really Irish – even though no reasonable member of the community in my place would be offended’, then I agree with Mr Kelly that the law needs some attention.  But I very much doubt whether that is the law.

 

As it seems to me, at the core of people’s worries about this statute, is the fear that ‘offensive’ is too plastic or personal or variable to be safely made the criterion of a law.  People think that the law should be made of sterner, clearer stuff.  They fear that it will be too hard to draw the line.  People might then be inhibited in what they say – the law may have ‘a chilling effect’.

 

The answer is that exactly these kinds of issues arise a lot of the time in all areas of our law without giving rise to the suggestion that as a result the relevant law should be abolished.  So much of our law is founded on moral questions of degree or issues of current standards or practice.  Was he honest?  Was she careful?  Did he break his word?  Did she intend to be legally bound?  Did he mislead her?  Did she lie to him?  Would what he said make others think less of her?  Did he mean to hurt her when he said that?  Was she offended by that remark?  What did he mean when he said that?  In that meaning, was it true?  Was it fair comment?  Will he get a fair hearing?  Will my renovation annoy my neighbour?  Will it be bad for the amenity of the area?  Was her purpose proper?  Was he acting with a good conscience?  On a bad day, a judge might ask you whether you have come to court with clean hands.  (That is the very wording of the law.)

 

Dealing with the issue of whether conduct is offensive in a legal sense is neither harder nor easier than any of those questions of degree that have either a moral base or that relate to conduct in the community at large – if you like, community values.

 

And of course there will be laws against offensive behaviour – such as a depraved professional man ogling or pawing schoolgirls on a tram; or a jilted suitor standing outside a church shouting that the bride is a slut and that her mum is worse; or a bystander abusing veterans in an Anzac Day march as war criminals; or a drunken blackfella bursting into the best pub in Kununurra and throwing up in front of a busload of Japanese senior citizens.  We have laws to allow police to intervene in such behaviour because in our opinion, it would be uncivilised for any of our citizens to be exposed to the hurt caused by that kind of offensiveness without protection from their government.

 

The other reason for these laws is related to the first – these kinds of offensiveness constitute a breach of the peace in themselves, and they are likely to lead to worse breaches of the peace if people ae left to help themselves.

 

And, yes, these laws could be abused, and they were abused by the police in the past before compliant magistrates, but the answer is to control the abuse, and not to abolish the law.  All this seems obvious.  Do those who want to abolish s 18C – Mr Kelly is not one of them – want to exclude behaviour that offends on the grounds of race – when that kind of offence is likely to be the most wounding and also the most likely to start a fight?

 

And, yes, laws against offensive language or behaviour do have an inhibiting effect – or, if you prefer, a chilling effect – on the way people behave.  Most laws are made for precisely that purpose.

 

Finally, where and when was the Golden Age of Mr Kelly’s ‘old Australian character’ when the nation was ‘famous for its straight talking’?  Assuming that Mr Kelly is not talking of the time of the White Australia Policy, when did we use to talk straight, and when did we stop?

 

If Mr Kelly is talking of times before laws were made against offensive language or behaviour, he will have to go back before the First Fleet to seek his Arcadia.

 

Poet of the month: Kenneth Slessor

Waters – Part I

This Water, like a sky that no one uses,

Air turned to stone, written by stars and birds

No longer, but with clouds of crystal swimming,

I’ll not forget, nor men can lose, though words

Dissolve with music, gradually dimming.

So let them die; whatever the mind loses,

Water remains, cables and bells remain,

Night comes, the sailors burn their riding-lamps,

And strangers, pitching on our graves their camps,

Will break through branches to the surf again.

A Bengal lancer in Paradise – My Debut at Peter Mac

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 8 Comments

 

When a few weeks ago I was provisionally diagnosed as suffering from cancer, a friend of mine, who is a distinguished equity silk, permitted himself a philosophical reflection.  It was to the effect that if I was going to get cancer, I was in or near the right city, because Melbourne was as good as anywhere else in the world with this form of illness.  Yesterday I got good evidence to support his view.  I went for the first time to the new Peter Mac on Grattan Street.  It is opposite the Royal Melbourne Hospital and diagonally opposite Melbourne University.  It is truly a thing of wonder.  I was told that it had only opened for business, if that is the term, on 23 June this year.  Being a public hospital, it may not be a joy forever, but it is bloody close to being a thing of beauty.

The design imposes on you as you drive up to it.  There is an indented arrival area outside a very soigné café that might call to mind an upmarket if not snooty hotel.  Inside it is all light and space and a sculptured atrium with a winding walkway that reminded me of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.  This place was set up and is now re-established to treat an ailment that gives most people the heebie-jeebies.  That is why we use terms like Bengal lancer and native dancer.  Those responsible for designing and building this facility obviously know this better than me, and they have sought by their work to neutralise the suspicion and fear of most of those who enter it.  I think that they have succeeded brilliantly.

I went to get a PET scan.  Imaging is on the fifth floor.  You use those lifts that require you to press a button for your destination and then a voice tells you which lift to take – an innovation that might unsettle some migrants, or some of the older pre-revolution citizens like me.  All members of staff have obviously been trained and disciplined in how to deal with visitors.  (I would put equal stress on each verb.)

For reasons I will come to, I had to wait some time before my turn came.  This is a public hospital and you certainly see the public here in all degrees – I may well have been the toffiest bastard in the waiting room.  (I even thought of hiding the label on my designer scarf.)  While I was waiting, I watched Fiji annihilate England in the Sevens.

Then a very nice young lady called Emily Hong took me to my room, and a chair that overlooked the whole of Elizabeth and Peel Streets, that huge flag, and the Turf Club Hotel.  The view was so good, I disdained the TV.  They inject you with a substance that glows in a scan under certain conditions.  You then rest for an hour on a reclining chair, and then go for the scan which takes about twenty minutes – and which may distress those who suffer from phobias.  (They might think of offering the eye-covers they give you on long haul aircraft.)  After what I thought was a decent interval, I made a serious tactical mistake.  I looked at my watch.  Only twenty minutes had elapsed, and from then on the watch got consulted at ever diminishing intervals.

When I thought that the hour had expired, I pressed the button Emily had left with me.  In came a man who looked remarkably like Peter Gordon, who gave me the good news that I was next up and, more importantly, that I was free to go the dunny.  Then another nice lady called Jo came and took me to ‘take the pictures.’  The scanner was not the kind of cocoon I had once experienced and was similar, I thought, to the one I had used at Kyneton.  When the pictures are taken, you wait until a doctor has seen them.  Then they take the device out of your arm – and you are free to go – and free to eat.  (This is one of those bloody fasting jobs.)  I had been there three hours, all the time marvelling at what was all around me.

Over the road I went then to the RMH to see the surgeon who has been asked to remove the offending item – assuming it is a cancer.  Well, any institution would look its age compared to the gleaming novelty I had just come from, and the RMH was somehow intimidating.   For some reason it reminded me of Gotham City sans Batman.  Well, I somehow found my way to where the surgeons consult, after a lift that was slower than those of the Waldorf Astoria and the Cavalry and Guards Club.  The surgeon had however left – for reasons I will relate.

I had proposed to drive down to town but the appointment was for 9.30 and I was afraid of the freeway at peak hour.  So I got the 7.11 from Kyneton which was due in at Southern Cross at 8.30 – plenty of time to enable me to get to the number 19 tram that I had used fifty years ago.  We got as far as Water Gardens – which is not a place most of you would like to stop at.  A Metro train in front of us had broken down.  The conductor was extremely helpful – but they were being misled by Metro.  We were told that the train would be removed.  I had told the conductor I was going to a medical appointment.  She asked what time it was, and I said I had plenty.

Events falsified that statement and I told her I would a get a cab from Footscray.  She took my name and said Vline would indemnify me.  After nearly an hour both networks tossed in the towel, and we abandoned train.  It was hopeless trying to get a cab, so I took a Vline bus to Southern Cross, and a cab from there to Peter Mac.  I got there at 10.00.  I was half an hour late.  I had managed to get through to them by phone to warn them.  My mistake was not to get them to do the same with RMH and the surgeon.  Hence he had left by the time I got there, and I was left starving and palely loitering, a victim of a schizophrenic train system.  I abstained from offering mordant comment on the irony of a doctor’s insistence on timekeeping.

So, I am currently left with the provisional diagnosis – the evidence for which came up quite by chance – that there probably is a cancer but that it can probably be dealt with by surgery.

I am putting this post out now to give people the gospel – the good news – about Peter Mac.

May I say that yesterday, even allowing for the train bugger-up, I was proud of my country and my city?  There is no doubt that Melbourne is the sporting capital of the world, but it is now very well served in music, theatre, opera and art, and it offers as diverse dining as you could find anywhere.  Although we complain about our public transport, Berlin is I think the only city that is obviously superior to it for transport.  Melbourne University is I think the most highly rated in Australia.  And now we have a landmark medical institution that is the best in the world.  But let us not cringe about world ranking – let us just rejoice that we have got this one absolutely right.  You only have to look across the Pacific to see how truly blessed we are with our medicine – and to see why any government that even hints at flirting with what we have will be sternly punished.

One of the great things about this city that you notice when you live outside it is its diversity.  You get it in the cabs.  The guy who took me to Peter Mac was from India – about 45 minutes from Delhi.  So, we talked about Darjeeling and the other Raj towns – he advised me not to bother going to Simla.  The guy who took me back to Southern Cross was from Egypt – about 45 minutes from Cairo.  He had a splendid pork pie hat, and when I said I was starving, he kindly offered me a banana.  The sad thing was that while the Indian man goes back home every year, the Egyptian has not been back in sixteen years, and does not intend to do so.  It must be terribly hard to forsake the land of your birth forever.

Finally, the other good news is that Melbourne Storm are on top, Melbourne City has signed our Timmy, and the Melbourne Football Club looks set to escape the half century curse of the late Norm Smith.  The Mighty Demons!

Passing Bull 55 Bullshit about manners, taste and identity

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Do you know about identity politics?  Have you never heard the phrase?  Could you give a damn?

If I were to sit down to dinner with Paul Kelly of The Australian, I suspect we could agree on a lot of political issues.  But I don’t think that we could agree on how to write about them.  Most of what Mr Kelly writes sounds to me like waffle – or bullshit.

Here are extracts from a piece on Saturday under the heading Race, gender: the risk of identity politics; Political correctness is stifling debate and dissent.

Identity politics, pursued in the U S and on display within university campuses and at the recent Democratic National Convention, is about laws, norms and etiquette to protect and advance identity causes. 

A powerful movement with deep cultural roots, it testifies to the revolution within leftist and progressive politics since the failure of Soviet communism and the supplementation of class consciousness with identity based on race, sex, gender and ethnicity.  This is fused by historic grievance suffered by such identities and their contemporary demand for redress.

The rise of politics based on the question ‘who am I?’ poses further problems of voter fragmentation for both the Coalition and Labor, though Labor has proved astute in channelling some of this sentiment.

This movement proves the ideological creativity of the Left, the manipulative power of human rights law and the perversion of the idea of justice – seen in this country in section 18 C of the Racial Discrimination Act where individuals can initiate legal action because they are ‘offended’ by others.

The politics of identity speaks to deep human need.  Yet its application veers towards narcissism, censoring of public debate, vicious campaigns of intimidation and a diminished public square.  It is extraordinary to see how many institutions and prominent figures buckle before the campaigns of identity politics, too weak to stand on principle.

The author then refers to the Four Corners program on the shocking abuses of indigenous children in the Northern Territory and says that politicians and the media were reluctant…

….to mention, let alone canvas, the underlying causes – the breakdown of the indigenous social and family order through a range of issues including family dislocation, neglect, violence, parental abuse and drunkenness.

The author then refers to an aboriginal commentator who referred of ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’.  After those disclosures, the author says that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

The author then referred to the cartoon by Bill Leak ‘depicting an irresponsible indigenous father who could not recall the name of his son.’  The author refers to the outrage this cartoon provoked, including that of one Minister who said that it was racist, and said that the cartoonist had pointed out the purpose of the cartoon:

… If you think things are pretty crook for children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from.  It wasn’t hard to get.  But the fascinating thing about Leak’s piece was the feedback he got that people couldn’t understand his cartoon.

That’s right, they didn’t get it – surely a victory for a politically correct, dumbed down education system and the spread of identity politics culture where such images turn the brain into a non—functioning, non—computing defence mechanism.

Is this Australia’s future?  It is certainly the future the progressives want…

…The essence of identity politics runs as follows: because you haven’t shared my identity, you haven’t shared my own oppression and you cannot understand my pain and if you cannot understand my pain you have no right to tell my group how to behave.  Identity politics, therefore, is hostile to ideas and debate.  Indeed, it mobilises the argument of ‘offence’ as a disincentive to debate and to challenge the right of others to engage in vigorous or provocative public discussion.…  Yet it is driven by powerful idea whose essence is ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me.’

….The parallel mechanism is social media – used to brand institutions and people as racist and sexist as a means of destroying them by mass hysteria.  In this climate the spirit of Orwell and Voltaire face a slow but sure death.  Let’s hope there is still sufficient left of the old Australian character and courage to turn back the tide.

What is going on here?

  • There is hardly one assertion of verifiable fact in this piece.
  • What we get are general comments on the kinds of behaviour of kinds of people. There are two levels of abstraction – the kinds of groups of various people, and the different ways in which membership of such groups are said to affect their behaviour.  In effect, Mr Kelly is applying labels to groups of people and then more labels to their perceived behaviours.  There is no room for you or me as individuals – we only get verbal constructs – that represent phantasms from the fear zone of the author.
  • What are the criteria for the author’s groups? ‘Race, sex, gender, and ethnicity.’  The first and last look to be identical.  The author also mentions class.  For reasons we are not told of, any distinctions between groups of people based on caste, class, creed, wealth, sexuality, health, education or age do not qualify for creating issues of ‘identity politics’.  Why not?  Each of them has been or is poisonous in Australia as setting up barriers between people.  Each label has been invoked to deny the individual dignity of real people and not just that of pictured groups.
  • What is the alleged problem with the behaviour of these groups? People inside the group say that people outside it do not and cannot understand them and are therefore precluded from commenting on them.  This is the broadest generalization of all.  Many French historians get very close to this precipice when discussing ‘their’ revolution’, but any Chinese, Jewish, gay, Muslem, aged or poor person who made such a claim in Australia would be plain bloody silly.  Would they accept the apparent converse – that they might be incapable of understanding or commenting on their estranged critic?  Of course white people have trouble following what is happening with blackfellas in the Northern Territory.  Most white people in Australia don’t have the faintest idea of how blackfellas live – and most of them are desperately keen to keep it that way.  It is the same with refugees.  But is absurd to suggest that as a result, white people are not qualified to discuss either.  If you want to attach a label to that kind of silly suggestion, one would be ‘racist’.
  • Mr Kelly does not claim to be standing in the middle on all this. He has a position, or, if you prefer, an agenda.  He names his opponents – leftists, progressives, the Left, perverted views on human rights and justice, and the politically correct.  The reader is taken to understand what those terms connote.  My understanding of them, which is limited, is that these terms have no intellectual content at all, but are code for the labels applied to those who follow Fairfax or the ABC.  I gather that the label for the conflict as a whole is ‘culture wars.’  I find it hard to imagine anything more sterile or unbecoming.
  • May I say something for the term ‘politically correct’, the Antichrist of Mr Kelly? Most people are conscious of differences between themselves and people of a different race; very few think that their group is inferior; most proceed on the contrary basis; there is therefore the basis for conflict between people of different races.  We tend to describe such conflict as ‘racist’ or ‘racial’.  To take a religious example, it would seem safe to posit that very few Muslems think that their Islam is inferior to the religion of Judaism, Hinduism, Voodoo, or Christianity.  The best that we can hope is that people are brought up well enough to avoid showing their feelings to people of a different race in a way that will offend them.
  • Now, what good manners or courtesy may require are matters of degree in time and space. They are matters on which reasonable people may differ.  The phrase ‘politically correct’ is I think too often a label used to obscure if not smear the role of courtesy in discussing sensitive issues like differences in colour or creed or sexuality.  We might think that some people go too far and get too precious, but that is no reason to discard courtesy altogether.  Courtesy and cutlery are what separate us from the apes.  I can well remember a gentle Catholic man at Blackwood telling me he thought a black footballer had gone too far in complaining of being called a black cunt, and I nearly fell over when I read that a former federal minister (Amanda Vanstone) could not understand why Adam Goodes objected to being called an ape, because we are all descended from them!  (It is I suspect reactions like these, which I regard as absurd, that cause some blackfellas to say that you have to at least have lived like a blackfella before you can understand how wounding white people might be to them.)  But debates at the edge do not warrant the abolition of the centre.
  • Mr Kelly does not need to explain a lot of his terms because he is using language familiar to most of his readers – who are expected to share his assumptions and to adopt his values. We are then talking in club.  At a guess, could that group exceed one in twenty of the adult population?  Put differently, could say ninety-five per cent of adult Australians give a bugger about any of these plays on words?  What do these questions tell us about the relevance of the Australian press to our politics?  Is this a perfect example of the kind of intellectual elitism the wholesale rejection of which has led to the uncomely rise of people like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Marine le Pen, and Pauline Hanson?
  • Some of Mr Kelly’s judgment, and it does read a little like a judgment, is not without condescension. We get references to the failure of Soviet communism, the fusion of historic grievances, and the ideological creativity of the Left.  We are told ‘the politics of identity speaks to deep human need.’  Well, survivors of the holocaust, or any other genocide, would agree.  But would they then ‘veer towards narcissism’?  Is this sweep not a bit large?  If, as we are, told the question is ‘who am I?’, may not the enquirer face the question put by Snow White when she looked at their mirror?  And what is wrong with ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me’?  Is that not just to put as a prayer in the first person an injunction normally expressed in the second?  How many people walk about asserting the contrary – ‘just walk all over me and get right up my nose?’
  • And as for the invocation of Orwell and Voltaire, could we have done a bit better with the Enlightenment than Voltaire? What about Kant, who said that each of us has a dignity that derives solely from our humanity?  Or are human rights inexcusably suspect?  As for Orwell, he said this about political language.

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And if you are looking for snobbery, we may put to one side ‘the mass hysteria’ of social media – of which I am blessedly ignorant – but it is hard to overlook ‘the politically correct dumbed down education system.’   Dear, dear, dear – a slogan and a cliché, and some of the poor buggers may have been exposed to government schools.

  • That is enough for this post. What we have so far is, I suggest, pompous drivel, or, in the style of Mr Kelly, a rant from the Right.  I will come back later to deal with the cartoon, the references to the alleged failures of parenthood within the indigenous community, the complaints about s 18C, and Mr Kelly’s invocation of a Golden Age.
  • May I just mention a piece in The Saturday Paper that made verifiable allegations of fact about aboriginals in the N T? We are told that the Territory has the population of Geelong but that they at Geelong don’t face the same problems – thirty per cent of the population are indigenous, not literate, speak another language, and suffer from various disadvantages.  It is then alleged that the government spends more on white people in Darwin than on black people in the sticks.  It then offers other critiques of government based on evidence that at least leave me better informed.
  • Finally, surely the big lesson from recent events in the U K and the U S is not that white people do not know enough about coloured people, but that they don’t understand enough about their own white people outside the current version of the Pale. In short, the complaint is the old one – people who live in Mr Kelly’s bubble don’t know how real people live.  They haven’t got the foggiest idea.

Since writing the above, I have watched the Four Corners program.  The brutality is horrifying.  Authorities gassed children held in close detention; two who thought they were being killed, huddled under a sheet and said good bye to each other; this was just one of the reminders of the hell of prisons described in For the Term of His Natural Life.  We have gone backwards since this country started as a barbarous jail.  We committed crimes against humanity against children.  We now stand further indicted of dismissing those crimes with the claptrap pf Mr Kelly and his colleagues about political correctness and identity politics.

 

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

 

Chessmen

 

Chafing on flags of ebony and pearl,

My paladins are waiting.  Loops of smoke

Stoop slowly from the coffey-cups, and curl

In this fantastic patterns down the room

By cabinets of chinaware, to whirl

With milky-blue tobacco-steam, and fume

Together past our pipes, outside the door.

 

Soon may we lounge in silence, O my friend?

Behind those carven men-at-arms of chess

Dyed coral-red with dragon’s blood, and spend

The night with noiseless warfare.  Queens and rooks

With chiselled ivory warriors must contend

And counter-plots from old Arabian books

Be conjured to the march of knights and pawns.

Passing Bull 53 Bullshit about banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

People go into business to make profits.  Banks are publicly listed companies in which shareholders subscribe capital and the directors manage the business to maximise the return of profit to those shareholders in the form of dividends.  If they run the business for another purpose, they break the law.

People running a general store in a country town do so to make profits.  But they also provide services that the community needs – bread and milk, newspapers, and postal facilities.  If they drop some of those services because they are not profitable enough, they will lose trust and goodwill.  In a bad case they may be driven out of business.

Any business has to pay some attention to its customers.  The banks certainly have to.  They occupy a privileged and protected position.  They are licenced by government, and de facto guaranteed by government.  A government body also controls the price of the basic commodity of banks – borrowed money.  That is a very unusual intervention into the market in what is said to be a capitalist economy.  It sounds like a kind of ‘dirty float.’

Banks are money lenders.  They borrow money at x% and lend it out at y%.  The difference between x and y is their profit (or loss).  The higher that y is over x, the more profit the bank makes, and the more dividends go to shareholders.

In principle, it would be quite wrong for the bank to prefer the interests of its customers – the borrowers – and take less back from them, because that way they would be putting the interests of bank borrowers ahead of their shareholders.  They bank directors are not allowed to do that.

Yet that is what we hear governments asking them to do by passing on the full fall of the cost of money to the banks to the borrowers rather than doing what they can to maintain profits for shareholders.  The bank directors have to make a business judgment about their standing in the community and its effects on the profitability of their bank, but otherwise government ministers howl for show.  Even our Treasurer might see that.

People don’t like moneylenders, and they have lost faith in Australian banks.  They stop us getting access to real people who know us and what they are doing.  They are offering incentives to their people to cheat and they are paying people more than five times what we pay our brain and heart surgeons.  They ruthlessly exploit silly people who borrow long on credit cards, and they in fact derive a lot of their capital from timid investors who think it is better to deposit their money in a bank rather than profit from investing in it.  Macquarie Bank makes people very ill because it makes big profits from dodgy deals like those that brought on by the GFC – while you and I stand behind it.  As a mate said during the GFC, if Macquarie falls over, it will have been worthwhile.

Yes, banks are ugly and untrustworthy, but they are not there to be ordered around by government.  Leave that to Mr Putin.  We are said to believe in competition.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

William Street

The red globes of light, the liquor-green,

The pushing arrows and the running fire

Spilt on the tongues, go deeper than a stream;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Ghosts’ trousers, like the dangle of hung men,

In pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee,

But none inside to suffer or condemn;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish

And puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,

Or grease that blesses onions with a hiss;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze

(Death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)

Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.